


As the Tide Rises

by RaisingCaiin



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Children's Stories, Gen, How Do I Tag, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Mild Gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-21
Updated: 2017-01-21
Packaged: 2018-09-18 22:52:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,677
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9406505
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RaisingCaiin/pseuds/RaisingCaiin
Summary: Elrond's father used to tell him and his brother such wonderful stories. . .





	

After a suitably tense period of silence, Elrond finally spoke. “My cousin told me an interesting story, not long ago.”

It was a sign, perhaps, of how long Maglor had been alone that the other Elf actually flinched at spoken words. “C-cuzz _in_?”

 _Who is left alive?_   went unsaid.

Elrond specified anyway. “Curufin’s son. Celebrimbor.”

Maglor said nothing.

“Or, well, he was alive when he spoke with me, at any rate. I cannot say for certain, now.” The campaign that had upended Elrond’s life as Sauron the Deceiver stamped across Eriador was surely dwarfed by the War that had ended Maglor’s world so many centuries ago, but still. War was war whether one waged it upon a bright stage that hosted the armies of the West and the Marrer of the world, or upon a teetering scaffold featuring but the skeleton remains of its former legends. Scale and setting be damned, war had ways of demanding blood and dispensing truth that all looked the same to those huddled down in the trenches.  

Still Maglor did not speak.

Little could have annoyed Elrond more. “No expressions of surprise that one of your line survived the bloodbath?” The bloodbath that had worsened when, in the celebratory aftermath of the Marrer’s defeat, Maglor and his last surviving brother had claimed a few more victims in a final rabid attempt at the Jewels.

“I-“ Obviously the art of language could desert even one of its former champions. Maglor’s voice was hoarse, rusted with disuse, and he picked over the very notion of words like a carrion crow on a months-old battlefield: the meat he so desperately sought had since long rotted away. “I-aigh. I. _I_! I- am not. _Nn_. Not s- _surprised_. Ex. Exact. _Ex_ -actly. . .”

Elrond grew tired simply _listening_ to him. “Save your breath, old one. The fault is mind: I will keep in mind that platitudes are as useless here as they would be in any case.”

They sat in silence again, then, seated side by side but some distance apart. Beneath their feet the grassy brown dunes fell into dirty white sand that slid into a filthy grey sea. The conversation they did not have was punctuated by the regular rise and fall of the filmy waves as they slapped onto the shore and then dragged themselves back out into the sea.

Elrond had long wondered what he would say to his foster-father when he saw Maglor again. _If_ he ever saw him again, that ill-famed second of Feanor’s line – the captain-bard who had condoned the fatal assault upon Sirion, mere hours before cradling a sobbing Elrond to his blood-sticky cuirass as he shouted down the lord Maedhros’s equally vehement attempts to reach the twins. And, until just recently, Elrond had thought that he would be gladdened, or at least relieved, to see again with his own eyes the Elf who had done so much to raise and teach him.

Until recently, though. Recently.  

“It was surprising, at first, that Celebrimbor did not know who I was.” Elrond trailed his fingers through the long, dry grasses at his side, watching them rustle at his fingertips with only the mildest of pressure upon their dry brown stalks. “But upon further thought, I realized that I should have expected as much. He disavowed all of you, I suppose, rather than just his father, and with that association terminated, how could he have known what further escapades you would become entangled in?” There was a mean glow of satisfaction when Maglor winced again, but the spark of it faded rather quickly, leaving behind only an unsatisfying hollowness.

He raised a hand in deterrence when Maglor coughed and looked like he would try to crank up his corroded voice again. “Ai, just stop – your croaking is painful to hear.” When Maglor subsided, Elrond dropped his hand back to the grasses, stroking them back to swaying.

“For all his arguable renouncement of blood-ties, though, my cousin – should we call Celebrimbor a cousin? I think I’ll claim him my cousin, for the line of Finwë is altogether too convoluted to bear overt consideration – my cousin held thought-provoking knowledge of those he had disavowed. In any case! He brought an interesting fact to my attention.”

Perhaps it was cruel to pause there, to wait and see if Maglor would honor his foster-son’s request not to speak, but Elrond was far past the point of concerns about cruelty.

Yet Maglor held his peace, and they sat again in silence as the murky grey waves pounded onto the grimy white shore.

“As I said, I should have suspected.” Elrond fiddled with a band of mithril upon the first finger of his right hand. “You always were wonderful with stories, Atya.”

The old name broke Maglor’s muteness where even the silence earlier hadn’t. Elrond did not turn to look at him, but he could both hear and envision the sputtering cough that preceded his foster-father’s pained refusal. “Ngh-n. _Nnn_. N-not. Not your. _Fa_ -ther.”

“Oh, fret yourself not on that score: I am well aware of it _now_.” Over the band went, over and over, turning and turning around on his finger. It was a nervous habit left over from the time he now described, but for some reason Elrond still had not managed to break himself of it. Perhaps he just wasn’t trying hard enough. “At the time, though – how old was I, Atya, ten? Twelve? By all accounts, my brother and I were mere babes – you most certainly became my father, or as good as. And, bless whatever you had in place of a heart, you certainly acted out all the privileges and responsibilities that came with the role.”

Maglor coughed and coughed, but did not try to speak.

“And you were quite good at it, too! We were nurtured well and well-loved.” It was easy to warm to the subject when his early years held so many good memories: Maedhros tutoring Elros in the basics of swordcraft, Maglor teaching Elrond a simple air upon his harp, long winter nights spent listening to Maglor’s renditions of the Age’s great tales while they huddled wide-eyed by the main room hearth in the crumbling fortress of Amon Ereb. “Surety and safety we might have lacked, but I can only know that in looking back. At the time, it never seemed that we were missing anything.”  

“Nnnn.” So Maglor did have a bit of his old fire still within him. _“Nn-_ never. Would’ave. Hh, HHAGh, _harmed_. You.”

Elrond had not sought him out to argue this particular point . “Mmmm. I suppose not. You always made sure to tell us so, after all.”

Not so far beneath their feet, the slimy grey sea washed in, and the slick pale sand pushed it back out again. 

The silence did not last so long this time. 

“Wh. _Where._ Elros?”

It was not such a surprising question. Really, the only surprising thing was that it had taken this long in coming.

“Oh, Elros.” The dry grass was so sharp, so pointed, beneath his fingertips: the slightest adjustment in angle could bring the dagger-like points right up into the fleshy skin beneath the nail. “He is dead, Atya.”

In a sudden flurry of movement, Maglor raised his head and twisted about: Elrond imagined that he was trying to catch his eye. Well, let him. “D-d. _Dead?”_

The point of one stalk snapped, its seed-pods cracking and scattering to the ground, hidden beneath the other dry grasses as the tip of the stalk lodged several sharp splinters beneath the skin of Elrond’s first finger. “Dead.”

Maglor’s face contorted into such a shape of pain and incomprehension that one could have been forgiven for thinking that he’d never heard of death before. An absurd contradiction, considering how much he had certainly dealt throughout his own lifetime.

“Dead,” Elrond repeated, just for confirmation. The splinters pricked, and a single drop of blood welled at the site of the largest entry.

Maglor shook his head, mutely. _How?_

“How did the old rhyme go again, Atya?” Elrond dabbed at the blood, just to see whether another drop might emerge. “By venom or blade / The Elda might fall’. . . A childish ditty for a childish time - careless meter, sophomoric rhyming scheme, the whole kit of poetic sins.” Another drop welled, and he dabbed at that one too. “But apt enough in the end, it seems.” A third drop welled, and a fourth, and a fifth.

“Sau-“

“Not Sauron, no, though I would appreciate it if we did not speak that name quite so carelessly.” At last the blood had stopped welling, though the thin slivers of dried grass were easily visible beneath the first layer of skin. “As I’m certain even you have heard, we sacrificed a great deal to bring him down. Indeed, I am High King of the Noldor now, by most accounts, although Galadriel could also put in a fine claim should she care to.” It would not be worth it to slit his finger still further to pry the splinters out, he supposed. Not yet, at least. “But no, our costs did not include my erstwhile brother.”

“El- Elros?” Maglor managed to get the name out, but it cost him two deep breaths that prompted another coughing fit.

The tide was coming in, and the dirty waves crawled further and further up the sand. The splinters in Elrond's finger prickled at him. 

“No, Elrond,” he said, absently. “Elros is dead, and many centuries past by this time, Atya. And, like the old rhyme says, he chose to.”

“Ehh?” It started out as a word that might have been ‘how?’ but it ended up in a dry retch that hacked its way up every inch of Maglor’s throat.

“How did he die, or ‘what do you mean he _chose_ to die, Elrond!’?” He was back to twisting the band of mithril around his finger, though the splinters now limited his range of motion a little. “In all fairness, I might interpret the question either way.”

Maglor doubled over with the force of his dry, retching cough. The waves came nearly to the bottom of the dunes.

“He chose to be counted among Men,” Elrond told him. “Atya.”

“No.” For the first time, Maglor was able to articulate a single word in a single breath. “No!”

“Yes, yes!” Elrond insisted. His skin would start swelling soon, fluid surrounding and cushioning the splinters to isolate them from the rest of his perfectly healthy, functional body. “It is poetic, isn’t it, an amazing story? Nearly as good as the one you used to tell us about the princess who made a daring leap into the ocean to protect her kingdom’s greatest treasure. I always did love the ending, hearing about how she was rewarded by the gods for her piety and turned into a great white bird, set free to soar across the sky and seek her true love. Much better than thinking she could have just dashed her brains out on the rocks below.”

Maglor’s breath came in great whistling gulps. The tide came in closer still. Clear liquid beaded within Elrond's first finger. 

“Elros, though.” Elrond shook his head at the memory of his twin’s old partialities. “My boisterous brother always did prefer the stories about a man who could become a star – or maybe it was a ship, I forget, there were so very _many_ stories. Or, no, he did so love the ones about our foremother. Noble Lúthien, who matched wits with the Marrer and lived to tell of it! Skilled Lúthien, who walked into the Halls of Mandos and demanded the return of her lover! Brave Lúthien, who renounced an eternal tie to Arda in favor of seeking whatever world it is that the Secondborn leave in search of!”

Elrond’s voice dropped lower, utterly without his control. “And we, Elrond and Elros, were descended from Lúthien herself, and _so_ , we were told, we might make the same choice as she did, someday. Her nobility and her skill and her bravery and her sacrifice meant that all her descendants might choose whether they would be Elves or they whether they might be Men.”

The last words came out near a whisper, though no doubt Maglor’s hearing had not suffered as his voice had. The encroaching sea almost drowned him out. “Utterly disregarding the fact that Dior Eluchil and Elwing Foamwhite were Elves, of course, and that Eärendil of Gondolin came from another line of Men entirely. Still, our Atya Maglor’s story went, we might choose whether we would be counted among Elves or among Men.”

Seaspray dampened what little of Maglor’s face remained uncovered by the older Elf's shaking hands.

“So.” With effort, Elrond’s voice regained its usual volume. “Elros, utterly desirous of following in his foremother’s footsteps, chose to be counted among Men. He married a daughter of Men, and Eonwe, by the authority of the Valar and in thanks for some father’s ‘services,’ offered him dominion over an island in the midst of the Sea. So Elros gathered together his new wife's tribesmen, and we made our good-byes, and off they sailed."

How Elrond's pricked finger scorched and stung! "Oh, Atya, he was long entombed by the time I first set foot in Numenór.”

Maglor scrambled to his feet, panting, as Elrond stood. “The interesting thing that I heard from Celebrimbor – and had confirmed by Galadriel, when she heard – is that Lúthien was unique in her choice between the kindreds.” Maglor’s eyes widened as Elrond’s hand slid to the hilt of the sword at his side. “Indeed, both asked who would have told me such a lie - Galadriel with little more than curiosity at my utter naivety, and Celebrimbor with more vehemence because, as he said, Elros would have had to take his own life if he did indeed die.”

Elrond’s hand twitched at the hilt. "So, Celebrimbor told me, my brother surely wanders Mandos even now.” His sword slid free a few inches from its sheath. “Not as a Man, temporarily halted in his passage to new lands, but as a self-killed Elf. Imprisoned. Perhaps for perhaps all time.”

“P-please,” Maglor rasped, his hands clutching spasmodically at his own arms. “No. No!”

 “Have some pride, would you?” Elrond could not find it in himself to have even the slightest of patience for this. “Not that there is much point to it now, I suppose, with the number of sins you have already committed! Dignity, then, perhaps I meant to say.” His sword was fully freed of the sheath now, and its tip rose neatly to the hollow of Maglor’s throat. “Have some dignity, Maglor.”

Maglor’s throat worked beneath the point of the blade. “Ngh. No – ah! – _no_.” His hands, loosed from their death-grip on his arms, fluttered uselessly at his sides. “You, _you,_ can. Cannot.” He did not drive himself forward, but he did not back away either. “Let. Let me.”

It gradually became clear what he was pleading for, and why. Elrond lowered his blade, and Maglor looked relieved at the motion, if no less pained at himself. “I had no plans to make a Kinslayer of myself, Atya.”

He turned away further when Maglor gestured toward the dagger at his other hip.

“No.” He sheathed his sword too, ignoring the way it brushed against the stinging splinters. “If Elros truly is stranded in the Halls, then I will not let you burden him with your company.”

Maglor gestured for the dagger again, more urgently this time, moaning when Elrond took a step further away.

“No.” It was surprisingly easy to turn his back on his foster-father, this time. “Make your penance in some other fashion, Atya. Perhaps there are other stories, better stories, that you might tell." 

The low sound behind him could have been the tide come in at last, or else perhaps a wind through the dry grasses. Maglor did not call out to him again, and with each step away he took, Elrond took felt lighter and lighter. 

**Author's Note:**

> This developed out of a throwaway conversation in another fic I'm working on, and kind of just demanded to be its own standalone. So. 
> 
> Atya (Q., 'father')


End file.
